I wish I could weep but I can’t. My second daughter, Michal, left for the States. Keats would write, “My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains…”
Several days before she left, she said to me that I was probably annoyed that here I had left the U.S. to come to Israel, and now she was going back to America. I told her that, no, that didn’t bother me in the least. I had always expected that since I had left my native land, my kids might do the same.
But the moment after we kissed good-bye, I thought of my great grandparents, Perl and Zachariah Katz. They had had nine children. One, Leyb, died in their home town, Smorgon, as did two of his three children. Six immigrated to the U.S. Two remained; one, a cripple, never married and was murdered in World War II. Zachariah and Perl never saw any of their American grandchildren, who must have been many. My grandmother Sheyne (Sadie in English) was the next to the last to arrive, and she had four children. I had never considered the pain and longing of Perl and Zechariah until the moment saying good-bye to Michal. Afterward, I thought, maybe the expectations were different then, and the pain would have been less. But I could hear my good friend Eileen upbraiding me (softly and with a smile), “Michael, mothers are mothers.”
Perl lost seven of her nine children. She lost them never to see them again or any of her grandchildren—except in photographs that, according to my Uncle Bill, were regularly sent abroad, just as every Simchat Torah, a flag to be carried around the synagogue would arrive from his grandfather. My great-grandmother Perl would not come to the U.S. because she was frightened by the journey across an ocean—iber the yam. She ran the family bakery while her husband Zachariah taught children in a cheder. Sheyne said (without the perspective of an adult not perhaps less selfish as the matriarch of her family, but then Litvak women are not known for sweetness of temperament but for commanding intelligence, criticism—not compliments—and an assumption of respect) of her own mother, that her mother was selfish—she went off to visit her sisters and left Sheyne to manage the shop. But how could a woman respond to a child she knew perhaps at birth she was destined to lose? Sheyne and her brother Hillel were the last to go. Hillel, who married twice, would be the third to die, as he was gunned down in a hotel lobby in 1912.
Perl was expected to financially support the family, cook the meals, clean the house (I don’t know if they had a helper), and bear nine children. Her husband, whom Sheyne obviously loved and whom she described as “edel,” noble, had it far easier. Sheyne remembered him as a father who never imposed his own opinion, and one whom parents entreated to teach their children because he was so gentle with them. With a friend, he subscribed to a Hebrew newspaper, which made him a member of the Hebrew Enlightenment. He would die in Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine to where he fled after the Germans invaded Smorgon in World War I. My Uncle Bill said of him: “At night he went to bed. Before turning over, he said, ‘Good night, children,’ turned over and passed away.”
How long ago that was. How many forgotten people.
I don’t remember the names of all Perl and Zachariah’s children—and the list a cousin prepared years ago is no longer at hand. Eli was the oldest. He lived in Connecticut. After they came to America, my grandparents and Bill lived with Eli, but according to Bill, his second wife disliked them—and, as a result, all connection was cut off. I know nothing about Eli’s family. Gittel, I believe was the next. She left with two uncles for America in the 1880’s. According to family legend, she kept kosher for them as they traveled west, and she expected to marry one of them. In the end, she married a Goldberg and lived out her life in Elkader, Iowa, in 1900, a tiny town of about 1,300 residents, where she kept a grocery store with her husband. They had one daughter, Dora, and she adopted one of her sister’s sons after that sister passed away. They were the only Jews in town. On Sundays, she would draw the slats and close the curtains and tell the children to hush so as not to disturb the Gentiles going to church. Dora studied at the University of Chicago, and fell in love with a goy, and, as her mother disapproved—her mother could be a fearsome woman—she never married. Hinde may have been the sister in Milwaukee who passed away, leaving three or four children, one of whom Gittel took in. Sara married a Josephson, and they had two sons and, I believe, a daughter, Leonard, Jimmy, and Gladys. I write these names down knowing there are few alive that saw them or remember them. Jimmy had a son and daughter. We used to visit the Josephsons now and then in Connecticut—heaven knows what happened to those children.
They are all lost in time.
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